Quote/Word of the week August 28, 2009

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: The sorrow that hath no vent in tears makes other organs weep. Sir Henry Maudsley.

WORD OF THE WEEK: Qualia: (from Quale 1675: The qualities of a thing).

These are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are a category of universals. They are ineffable ; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.

For example as in Proust’s discussion of sensation in The Prisoner and The Fugitive:

‘Sometimes I thought that the reason was that the things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyze them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is the thing that causes us specific ecstasy we feel from time to time and which, when we say, ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbour, in whom the sun and weather set off quite different vibrations.’